SOMALIA: HEARTS, MINDS & HOLY WAR . Robin Barnwell and Aidan Hartley provide an eye-opening account of the most successful Islamic revolution to happen in the world since 9/11, and the setting up of a new Taliban-style state which threatens to export war to the entire horn of Africa. Westerners are completely absent from Mogadishu, with the situation even more precarious for journalists following the murder of cameraman Martin Adler, shot by an unidentified hit man at an anti-American public rally in June. Barnwell and Hartley are forced to work under constant threat of assassination from various factions.
Beginning their journey in Mogadishu, it's immediately clear that militants, known as the Union of Islamic Courts (UIC) have seized the capital and are extending their power through both the gun barrel and religious persuasion. While Western powers failed to bring law and order to even a few blocks of Mogadishu and rescue Somalia from years of anarchy and 500,000 deaths, Unreported World shows how UIC has been winning the hearts and minds of ordinary Somalis by quickly brought about a real improvement to their lives.
Within weeks of taking control of Mogadishu earlier this year the UIC ended the anarchy in both the capital and hinterland. Backed by the Somali business tycoons who are their main financiers, they have reopened the seaports, airports and roads which were closed for more than a decade by vicious rival clan gangs. Unreported World reveals how the economy appears to be reviving, schools are full, hospitals seem quieter, mosques are being repaired, piracy on the high seas is being stamped out and streets are being cleaned of battle damage.
However the programme also reveals that Wahhabi hardliners who dominate the Jihadist movement are starting to establish a Taliban style state that is anathema to the moderate, mostly Sufi traditions of Somalia's Sunnis. A centralised Sharia court system is sending murderers to the firing squad, and the militants are attempting to force women to wear the veil, banning public entertainment such as TV, cinema and music; and trying to outlaw the widespread use of the stimulant leaf qat and cigarettes, and even long hair.
The international community refuses to engage with the UIC because among its leaders are men linked to al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden has described the Islamic militia as an ally in his global jihad. Western intelligence fears they may also be radicalising young Somalis in preparation for terror attacks.
For his part, the UIC's supreme leader Shaykh Hasan Dahir Aweys says that 9/11 was a legitimate military tactic of war. The Jihadists tell Hartley that their aim is to seize the rest of Somalia and expand jihad across Africaâs Horn.
In response, the Ethiopian government has deployed forces on a battle footing to the inland village of Baidoa. This pocket of territory, a few kilometres wide, is what Somalia's legal, pro-Western and secularist 'President' Abdullahi Yusuf has made his last stand together with his warlord allies. Peace talks between the warring sides have collapsed and the United Nations blames 10 separate nations for pouring weapons and troops into Somalia. This fresh Horn of Africa conflict has already started, and it pits Jihadists against Western-backed Christians in a clash which threatens the whole stability of the region.
Somalia: The True Story Of Black Hawk Down. |
Somalia: The True Story Of Black Hawk Down. Note: This video is hosted on: Google.com The Battle of Mogadishu or for Somalis Ma-alinti Rangers ("The Day of the Rangers") was a battle that was part of Operation Gothic Serpent that was fought on October 3 and 4, 1993 in Mogadishu, Somalia, by forces of the United States supported by UNOSOM II against Somali militia fighters loyal to warlord Mohamed Farrah Aidid. The battle is also referred to as the First Battle of Mogadishu to distinguish it from the later Second Battle of Mogadishu.
Task Force Ranger, which consisted of an assault force made up of Army Delta Force, 4 US Navy SEALs, and Ranger teams, an air element provided by the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, and members of the Air Force Pararescue/Air Force Combat Controllers, executed an operation which involved traveling from their compound on the outskirts of the city to capture leaders of Aidid's militia. The assault force was composed of nineteen aircraft, twelve vehicles and 160 men. During the operation, two U.S. MH-60 Black Hawk helicopters were shot down by rocket-propelled grenades, and three others were damaged. Some of the soldiers were able to evacuate wounded back to the compound, but others were trapped at the crash sites and cut off. An urban battle ensued throughout the night. Early the next morning, a joint task force was sent to rescue the trapped soldiers. It contained soldiers from Pakistan, Malaysia, and U.S. soldiers of the 10th Mountain Division. They assembled some 100 vehicles, including Pakistani tanks (American-made M48s) and Malaysian Condor armored personnel carriers, and were supported by U.S. A/MH-6 Little Bird, and MH-60 helicopters. This task force reached the first crash site and led the trapped soldiers out. The second crash site was overrun and pilot Mike Durant, the lone surviving American, was taken prisoner but later released.
Somali casualty figures are unknown, but American estimates are that between 1,000 and 1,500 Somali militiamen and civilians lost their lives in the battle, with injuries to another 3,000-4,000. The book Black Hawk Down: A Story of Modern War estimates more than 700 Somali militiamen dead and more than 1,000 wounded. Eighteen American soldiers died and 73 were wounded (another American soldier, Delta team leader SFC Matt Rierson was killed in a mortar attack two days later). Among UN forces, 1 Malaysian soldier died and 7 were wounded, along with 2 Pakistanis.
 Map Somalia Archives consist of articles that originally appeared in Collier's Year Book (for events of 1997 and earlier) or as monthly updates in Encarta Yearbook (for events of 1998 and later). Because they were published shortly after events occurred, they reflect the information available at that time. Cross references refer to Archive articles of the same year.
In 1992, Somalia's very existence as a nation was threatened. Several hundred thousand people died, victims of civil war violence or a countrywide famine, and more than half a million others fled. Late in the year hundreds of thousands of Somalis still were threatened by starvation, largely because the bulk of the food relief that was sent to the desperate nation was stolen by soldiers and armed looters. Finally, in December, the United Nations took the extraordinary step of approving a massive U.S.-led international military intervention to safeguard relief operations.
Somalia began to disintegrate in November 1991 when the United Somali Congress, which had over-thrown President Muhammad Siad Barre ten months before, split into two warring factions. One was led by Ali Mahdi Muhammad, the nation's interim president; the other, by General Muhammad Farrah Aideed. The two warlords, from different subclans of the Hawiye clan, battled throughout the capital, Mogadishu. Fighting continued into 1992.
A UN-sponsored cease-fire, signed by Ali Mahdi and Aideed in March 1992, was almost entirely ineffective. With the north of the city controlled by Ali Mahdi and the south, including the vital port, in the grip of Aideed, the fighting flared intermittently through most of the year. By midyear Mogadishu already was devastated.
Around the country various factions waged armed power struggles for most of the year, although the fighting abated as the year went on. Most of the casualties of the fighting occurred between November 1991 and March 1992, when an estimated 40,000 people were killed or wounded. In July, UN Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali pronounced Somalia 'a country without a central, regional, or local administration.'
Famine and Flight.
The war, coupled with looting by armed groups and a severe drought that afflicted much of Africa starting in 1990, left much of the nation's farmland unplantable, which triggered mass starvation. From January 1991 to December 1992, more than 300,000 Somalis â including a quarter of all children under five â starved to death. In late 1992 the International Red Cross estimated that a third of Somalia's population remained at risk of starvation. The agency also reported that during 1991 and 1992, 2.5 million Somalis were displaced from their traditional homelands. It is believed that approximately 500,000 fled to Kenya, while tens of thousands of others escaped to Yemen, Djibouti, and Ethiopia. Those who remained had to marshal their waning strength to fend off cholera, measles, typhoid, and pneumonia, all of which increased in incidence as sanitary conditions worsened and people were weakened by malnutrition. Some farmers were so weak, hungry, and desperate that they would eat the seeds they received from relief workers rather than doom them to the arid soil. Heavy rains brought an end to the drought late in the year, but the famine continued.
Relief Efforts Subverted.
Relief workers, in Somalia under UN or private agencies' auspices, often found themselves in peril, with their food aid hijacked far more often than it was handed out. Not only did the interfactional fighting frequently make it too dangerous to undertake relief deliveries, but soldiers on all sides looted supplies on a massive scale, as did gangs of armed bandits. An estimated 75 percent of the more than half a million tons of food relief sent to Somalia in 1992 by the International Red Cross, the UN, the United States, and other nations was stolen before it could reach starving Somalis. Some looted food was sold on the black market. Tens of thousands of tons of undeliverable food rotted in Mogadishu warehouses and on ships that were stopped outside Mogadishu and the southern port of Kismayu. As supporters of Ali Mahdi and Aideed battled for ultimate control of those regions, the warlords would not agree to allow relief ships into the ports. Several ships that attempted to sail into the Mogadishu port without explicit permission were shelled.
In addition to looting, soldiers and armed bandits resorted to extortion. The Red Cross routinely gave 10 percent of each food shipment to the ruling faction of the local village, but this did not deter the gunmen from taking much of what remained. By December the Red Cross had hired 2,600 armed Somalis to guard food shipments, and the UN had hired 10,000 for the same purpose â but the line between guard and looter was dangerously thin, and often crossed.
As a result, several relief agencies were forced to withdraw from villages that were especially devastated by famine. In September the UN pulled its workers from Kismayu after threats from clan militias. In early October the UN and CARE both retreated for several weeks from the southwestern village of Bardera; the death rate soared to more than 200 a day in their absence. A month later, CARE canceled all food convoys to Baidoa â a village northeast of Bardera where as many as 300 people a day had died in September â following shootouts over food. Even the normally unfazed Red Cross, which was feeding 500,000 people a day in 600 centers across the country, had reduced its staff in Baidoa to three by December.
Changing World Response.
It took the UN and its more powerful member nations the better part of 1992 to achieve any notable progress in Somalia. In April the UN Security Council voted to send 50 military observers to monitor the results of the abortive March cease-fire, but the full contingent did not arrive until August, after Aideed's objections were overcome. By the end of September the Security Council had approved a total of 4,219 security and relief personnel, but in December only 500 Pakistani troops had arrived because Aideed had opposed any additional deployment. An emergency airlift of food from the UN began in August, but much of it was blocked or stolen en route to hard-hit villages. A multistage U.S. airlift of 145,000 tons of food aid to outlying regions, which started in October, was plagued by similar problems.
With the relief efforts continually frustrated, world sentiment had been building in favor of armed intervention. In November, U.S. President George Bush offered American troops for a UN effort, provided that it be under U.S. command. Finally, on December 3, 1992, the UN Security Council approved the deployment of a massive U.S.-led multinational force to create 'a secure environment for humanitarian relief operations.' As many as 24,000 U.S. troops were slated to take part in the mission, and more than 30 other countries were expected to contribute a total of 15,000-20,000 troops. On December 9, 1,800 U.S. and 2,100 French troops arrived in Mogadishu; facing no organized resistance, they took control of the port and airport the following day.
On December 11, Ali Mahdi and Aideed pledged themselves to a U.S.-brokered agreement to remove their armored vehicles from the streets of Mogadishu; the first of Aideed's vehicles left the capital ten days later. The two warlords met publicly in Mogadishu on December 28 and again promised to stop the fighting. A week after they entered Somalia, UN-sponsored troops arrived in Baidoa, where they secured the airstrip and guarded food convoys; days later, U.S. and Belgian troops secured the airport at Kismayu, where clan fighting and starvation had worsened in December. By year's end the U.S.-led forces had achieved their stated objective of securing eight towns serving as relief centers. President Bush visited Mogadishu and Baidoa, touring relief operations and observing the New Year's holiday with U.S. troops, as 1992 gave way to 1993.
During the first week of the UN mission, violence in the capital and elsewhere decreased dramatically. But then the gunmen, seemingly confident that they would not be disarmed, began to emerge again. This development intensified debate over the purpose of the UN mission, which the United States saw initially as securing ports and airfields, opening supply routes, and establishing safe food distribution centers. Boutros-Ghali maintained that U.S. troops should also disarm the rival militias and roving gangs in order to ensure Somalia's long-term security. At the end of December, U.S. policy seemed to have shifted somewhat toward trying to confiscate arms and 'technicals' â Jeep-like vehicles mounted with heavy weapons.
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